Trump already has open door to grow U.S. military presence in Greenland thanks to a little-known Cold War-era agreement between the U.S. and Denmark

President Donald Trump’s yearslong threats to take over Greenland have crescendoed this week. On Wednesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump is considering a range of options in pursuit of the country, and that “utilising the U.S. military is always an option at the commander-in-chief’s disposal.”

But according to foreign policy experts, Danish officials have been baffled by Trump’s threats to resort to military intervention to gain control of Greenland because there’s already a long-standing agreement in place for the U.S. to increase its military presence there. In 1951, the U.S. and Denmark signed a little-known defense agreement allowing the U.S. “to improve and generally to fit the area for military use” in Greenland and “construct, install, maintain, and operate facilities and equipment” there. 

“This agreement is very generous, it’s very open,” Mikkel Runge Olesen, a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies in Copenhagen, told Fortune. “The U.S. would be able to achieve almost any security goal that you can imagine under that agreement.”

Given the wide-reaching terms of the contract, “there is very little understanding as to why the U.S. would need to take over Greenland at this time,” Olesen added.

Though Trump’s desire for Greenland has punctuated both of his administrations (in 2019, his intentions to...